Paying Back the Teachers

By Patrick McDonagh

Perhaps a change is as good as a break, but some theatre professionals never seem to rest. These days, Kent Stetson, the Montreal-based playwright who won the 2001 Governor-General’s Award for his play The Harps of God, is involved with a translation of his work soon to be produced in France, and is also running intensive playwriting workshops in Provence, in addition to writing new plays. Judith Koltai, a Victoria-based dance and movement professional, coordinates an experimental performance collective, The Cassandra Experiment, in addition to her pioneering work exploring and teaching the creative and the therapeutic potential of dance and movement. Peter Hinton, who has been the Associate Artistic Director of Theatre Passe Muraille and CanStage, Artistic Director of the Playwrights Theatre Centre in Vancouver, and Dramaturge in Residence at Playwrights’ Workshop Montreal, is today the high-profile AD of English Theatre at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. Clearly, all three have a passionate and active (as well as full-time) commitment to theatre and performance. But they also share another bond: all three create space in their professional lives to teach at the National Theatre School. Why do they do it?

Peter Hinton, Artistic Director of English Theatre at the NAC. © Laird MacKintosh

“Well, it sure isn’t the money,” says Stetson. “But I think there is a common desire to share the best of what one has with the best of those who are coming along. And teaching is a way of expressing a kind of love for the potential of theatre.” In addition to the warm fuzzy feeling of giving back to the art, Stetson notes other benefits to the pedagogical pause. While it may not stimulate his own writing – “I’m already over-stimulated,” he says – it offers a welcome change from a writer’s life. “Actually, being with students calms me down a bit,” he says. “It shifts me out of that extraordinarily intense world I have to enter as a writer.” Is it therapeutic, then? “No, I wouldn’t go that far. It’s a diversion, an engagement with the every-day. And the students are all so smart and talented, that I truly enjoy it.” This year, Stetson is leading second year acting students through a series of writing exercises. “I give them a set of tools to analyze what their classmates have written, so the process includes exercises in writing, in listening to what they hear, and in analyzing the text from a playwright’s point of view.” And some students show promise as true writers. “But I’m not going to tell them,” he laughs. “That would be a terrible thing to do.”

“Whatever we bring to teaching at the School must recognize that our work fits into a larger vision,” says movement teacher Judith Koltai. “My contribution is to bring about a greater consciousness of and respect for the non-verbal and the physical.” The first task, she notes, involves eliminating the restrictive physical habits that we develop in our attempts to cope with life – and then, drawing on the principles of the Jung-influenced practice of Authentic Movement, to help them explore the potential of their bodies as interpretive instruments. “It is a comprehensive process,” she says. “We’re not just doing a set of exercises.” Her work addresses the students’ minds as well as their bodies, and each teaching experience takes a slightly different shape. “Whenever I teach, I have to adapt my guiding principles to whatever my eyes and ears are telling me,” she explains. “Teaching provides an enlivening challenge that I love, because I feel renewed every time. It cannot be the same each time if it’s going to do any good. Otherwise it’s just a dead methodology, which is the last thing actors need.” And, of course, there is the joy of seeing students progress. “You change from your role as someone to whom the students look for approval, to being a witness to their own explorations and progress. It’s like witnessing a bit of a miracle.”

“The most exciting things happen pedagogically when the instructor is as engaged with learning as the students.” – Peter Hinton

Judith Koltai, movement teacher, with Greg Gale, 3rd year Acting student. © Maxime Côté

The challenge of learning along with one’s students appeals to Peter Hinton, whose relationship with the NTS stretches back two decades. Under Hinton’s hand, the National Arts Centre has created a theatre development research project called The Ark, which brings together actors and other theatre professionals to explore plays without the pressures of having to mount a production. Hinton – serving, in this case, as Noah – has drafted a company of sixteen professional actors, along with a dramaturge, directors, and designers, to sink themselves into 18 sixteenth and seventeenth century plays, by writers ranging from Marlowe to Congreve. And he has partnered the professional actors with twelve second-year NTS actors, creating a versatile theatre research hothouse. “It’s really a bath of the plays of the period,” he says. “We’re going back to exploring and dreaming.”

“The most exciting things happen pedagogically when the instructor is as engaged with learning as the students,” Hinton attests. “I like to enter into the process with my pants down a little bit too. I enjoy teaching things that I want to learn about. Of course, it’s all in the spirit of exploration,” he laughs. “I don’t want to use students as lab rats to test theories about theatre...” Sometimes, the students push instructors in unanticipated directions. “I’m always astonished when those things I think students won’t understand, they do understand – but then with ideas I think will be easy, they run into a brick wall. Each class is different,” he says. As a result, he notes, much of the job involves giving the students the tools they need to learn. “It’s a bit like learning how to find your way out of the woods at night – or it’s like an archeological dig: I don’t know what’s going to be underneath all the sand, but I know when to get out the pickax and when to get out the toothbrush, and I can share that with students. That is the exciting part of exploring texts together.”

Inviting NTS students onto The Ark is just one way that the world of pedagogy and professionalism embrace one another. “All of us who teach must constantly get back into the ‘real world’ so that we don’t get caught in the kind of isolation that can happen otherwise,” says Koltai, “The two worlds have to feed each other.” Indeed, at some point, the students also become professionals, further enriching the relationship. Koltai’s Cassandra Project performance research group is comprised largely of former or longtime students from the theatre and dance world. “None of my NTS students has joined yet, but I’m hoping it will happen eventually,” she says. Stetson, too, is in touch with many of his former students, including an on-going collaboration with Nick Carpenter (Playwriting, 1998). “These relations we build are valuable,” he says. “Plus,” he laughs, “maybe one of these students will become an AD somewhere, and stage my plays.”

INTERESTED IN LEARNING MORE?
Visit Stetson’s masterplayworks.com, Koltai’s cassandraexperience.ca, and the NAC’s nac-cna.ca/en/theatre/ark.html websites.

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